O'Reilly Network: Roll Over, Rollovers -- CSS Style

O'Reilly Network: Roll Over, Rollovers -- CSS Style

Roll Over, Rollovers -- CSS Style
by Eric Meyer
03/23/2001

In my never-ending quest to make the world a more secure and stylish place, the subject of image rollovers recently came to mind. They're everywhere on the Web, including my personal Web site, but it's always bothered me that such a simple effect requires JavaScript. Don't we have enough to worry about in this life without having to construct pre-loading, image-swapping, faintly perverted scripts just to make a link look pretty and be interactive?

Sure, CSS lets us change text colors with a:hover, and that's great for text-heavy sites like CNN, but what about the rest of us? Especially the ones who have to cope with the demands of marketing departments? For that matter, it would be nice if authors could learn straight HTML (or xhtml) and CSS, and still be able to have buttons that flash and change. If you're into that kind of thing, I mean. (Aren't we all?)